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Peaked Roofs, Crossed Fingers

THERE was great excitement last fall in the part of Brooklyn known affectionately as Victorian Flatbush when the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission recommended that Midwood Park and Fiske Terrace, two neighborhoods within this network of communities south of Prospect Park, be designated a historic district.

On Tuesday, five months after the original hearing, the commission is scheduled to announce its decision, and for those who support the designation, the outlook seems rosy. “There was an incredibly positive feeling at the initial hearing,” said Lisi de Bourbon, the agency’s communication director. “The commission has worked really hard on this designation.”

Barring any last-minute change of heart on the part of the commission, only a rejection by the City Council or the mayor would undo the designation.

The effort to protect these two communities, with their trove of turn-of-the-century wooden houses adorned with hand-cut gables and fronted by spacious porches, has been almost a decade in the making.

And it has been watched with a mixture of happiness, envy and impatience in neighborhoods throughout Victorian Flatbush. Many of these communities are also fighting to preserve their own history and distinctive nature, and they are fearful that the city bureaucracy will move so slowly that by the time they are considered for protection, there will be nothing left to protect.

The neighborhoods of Victorian Flatbush are of particular interest to historians because in many respects they were the first suburbs. With the newly built Brooklyn Rapid Transit rail line stretching out to Coney Island, the farmland of the Dutch village of Flatbush became a prime location in the early 20th century for what was considered commuter living.

Developers like Dean Alvord, Lewis Pounds and especially Thomas Benton Ackerson began chopping that farmland into meticulously planned residential neighborhoods, and advertising them as a sophisticated alternative to “cliff dwelling” in a Manhattan apartment building.

The developers were selling country living in the heart of one of the world’s largest and busiest cities. Along Prospect Park South, for example, green malls divide wide boulevards that were lined with intricate wrought-iron street lamps and Norway maples. Utilities were buried underground before any houses were built.

All the neighborhoods featured houses built in the most fashionable of Victorian-era styles, among them Tudor, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival and Georgian. These houses, adorned with carved moldings, fluted columns, copper trimmings and wide, open porches, evoked a lifestyle that went beyond architecture. Exclusive social clubs flourished in the area, as did community associations, many of which have been the driving force in campaigns for historic protection.

But Victorian Flatbush could not remain a suburban oasis. With New York’s population rising, most of the original suburbanites moved even farther away by the 1920s. Many turn-of-the-century homes were divided into multifamily houses or boardinghouses, or razed and replaced with apartment buildings.

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454 and 446 Rugby Road, in Ditmas Park West.Credit
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

In the 1970s, community associations and concerned residents began seeking to have their neighborhoods designated as historic districts.

Albemarle-Kenmore Terraces, two blocks arranged in a striking mews style, received such a designation first, in 1978, followed by Prospect Park South in 1979 and Ditmas Park in 1981. But even if Midwood Park and Fiske Terrace follow in their footsteps, less than half of Victorian Flatbush will be protected, a source of outrage among some residents.

“We don’t want the Manhattanization of Brooklyn,” said Ron Schweiger, the Brooklyn borough historian and a longtime resident of Beverley Square West. “We don’t want high-rises coming into residential areas. That’s why we want all of Victorian Flatbush to get historic district status.”

And though the neighborhoods of Victorian Flatbush have distinct characters, nearly all of them have one thing in common: residents eager to protect what is a remarkable and in some cases irreplaceable architectural history.

Caton Park

Caton Park, which sits just south of the Parade Grounds athletic fields, is one of Victorian Flatbush’s smaller micro-neighborhoods, with about 50 Victorian homes on a handful of blocks. Its diminutive size means that each house remodeled (or, as many in Victorian Flatbush like to say, “re-muddled”) represents a blow to the neighborhood’s prospects for preservation.

But Caton Park has its share of history. William Styron, whose 1979 novel, “Sophie’s Choice,” is set in postwar Flatbush, lived in one of the many large homes that were subsequently converted into boardinghouses. (The film version was shot in the more glamorous Prospect Park South.)

Some residents worry that too many homes have already been torn down or remodeled beyond recognition. The neighborhood also has the disadvantage of being the product of a number of different designers, unlike some of the areas to the south. But these drawbacks have not stopped the community’s more preservation-minded residents from seeking to keep intact the area they call NoProPaSo (North of Prospect Park South).

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South Midwood, with about 450 houses, represents the other extreme: It is the largest of Victorian Flatbush’s neighborhoods, and the public gardens on the campus of Brooklyn College, at the neighborhood’s southern border, add to the period ambience.

The community’s application for historic district status, made during the first wave of such application in the late 1970s, was rejected by the landmarks commission, which argued that too many of the houses were covered with vinyl or aluminum siding.

But one stretch of Bedford Avenue, a series of attached brick row houses, remains exceptionally well preserved.

Marcia Seller, who owns one of the row houses, tried last year to get some of those houses designated as a landmark, but was rejected; Mary Beth Betts, the commission’s director of research, suggested that Ms. Seller reapply when she had new information about the houses. Ms. Seller was nonplused. “What more could I tell them?” she said. “These houses really are in danger.”

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1403 Ditmas Avenue, in Ditmas Park West. Credit
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

West Midwood

West Midwood shares a border, a verdant look and a lot of architectural history with Midwood Park and Fiske Terrace, the two communities currently up for designation, and their developer, Ackerson, also designed many of the houses in West Midwood.

Though the West Midwood Community Association has debated the merits of historic district status on several occasions, it has never made an official application. One argument against seeking the designation is the fear that the cost of maintaining a home under the commission’s standards would be too high.

Beverley Squares

Beverley Square East and West, nestled between Prospect Park South and Ditmas Park and completed just after the turn of the 20th century, were Ackerson’s major projects. The developer also got certain streets that run through Beverley Square West rechristened with upper-crust British names: East 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th Streets became Westminster, Argyle, Rugby and Marlborough Roads.

All the original homes of the Beverley Squares were individually designed. Ackerson himself lived in a house in Beverley Square West, and the developer Pounds, a future borough president, lived in Beverley Square East.

Beverley Square East has no active community association. But Beverley Square West may be the furthest along of the undesignated neighborhoods in Victorian Flatbush. The landmarks commission is scheduled to do a walk-through of the neighborhood in the fiscal year that starts this summer.

But Erin Joslyn, a preservation-minded screenwriter who moved to the neighborhood four years ago, realizes that more historic homes could be lost before the commission acts. Meanwhile, she has set up a Web site that awards kudos for historical restorations and includes a wall of shame for “re-muddlers.”

Ditmas Park West, which sits in the heart of Victorian Flatbush, lacks the Arts and Crafts bungalows designed by Arlington Isham that helped win Ditmas Park its historic district status. But this neighborhood has its share of dedicated preservationists, and although the community’s first application was declined in the early 1980s, the commission staff revisited the neighborhood two years ago.

“They didn’t say no, but they didn’t say yes, either,” said Gary Sucher, president of the community association. “Now we’re in a kind of holding pattern.”

In this limbo, each new neighbor or renovation project arrives with a question: Will this help or hurt the community’s chances for designation as a historic district? Many new residents are attracted by the neighborhood’s historical look and quickly set to work on restoring their homes in the original style, converting multifamily homes back into single-family houses, and tearing off vinyl siding to reveal perfectly preserved cedar shingles.

But brick facades and vinyl siding are cheaper to build and maintain than the ornate wooden details on Victorian homes, and without legal muscle, preservationists can do little to prevent such renovations.

“When we see someone building a fence or bricking up the front of their house, some neighbors try to speak to them, try to educate them,” Mr. Sucher said. “I don’t like the idea of regulating taste, but there’s no other way of preserving what we have.”